Recently, U.S. President Donald Trump met in Singapore with the dictatorial leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un. In the time since, he’s repeated the claim over and over again in various forms that the summit is the beginning of a significant shift in global politics. He desperately wants some approval for having gone to the meeting, having lavished praise on both himself and his North Korean counterpart.
Now, in another desperate attempt to again set apart the summit as some kind of politically shattering event, Trump has taken to Twitter to again deride past U.S. presidential administrations’ dealings with North Korea.
Monday, he wrote:
‘If President Obama (who got nowhere with North Korea and would have had to go to war with many millions of people being killed) had gotten along with North Korea and made the initial steps toward a deal that I have, the Fake News would have named him a national hero!’
There are a number of inaccurate underlying notions here.
For one, the issue that many media outlets have with Trump’s behavior in connection to the meeting he had with Kim Jong Un is not the fact that he took the summit in the first place.
The issue that many have raised is that he has completely glossed over the fact that Kim is a murderous dictator, opting instead to tout a “special bond” that he’s formed with the leader coming away from their meeting and praising him as “smart” and even “funny” instead of even making any apparent significant public attempt at holding the leader accountable for his human rights violations.
In addition, what Trump has come away from the meeting with besides his praise of the North Korean leader is an agreement that the two leaders signed that doesn’t actually set much in stone when it comes to the path forward. He calls the agreement part of the “initial steps toward a deal,” but what happened is that we got similar informal commitments to denuclearization from the North Koreans that we’ve already gotten and Trump took the world by surprise and announced that American military exercises around the Korean peninsula would cease. (The exact fate of those exercises is still being formed.)
On top of all of this, the irony in the president’s assertion in the above tweet is that Obama did, actually, both express a willingness to actually meet with dictatorial, adversarial world leaders — and Fox News attacked him for it.
Thus, the president’s contention that Obama would have earned some kind of widespread support by meeting with the leader of North Korea is — while perhaps true in the case of some mainstream interests — proven wrong by the president’s own favorite station, Fox News. Trump acts as though Obama holding a meeting like that would have redeemed the former president in the minds of Republicans, but that’s not exactly a contention based in reality.
The reality is just that Trump’s meeting with the North Korean leader, to him and his supporters, will continue to further establish him as some sort of pseudo-messiah leagues ahead of any former president, no matter the actual facts of the situation.
Check out Twitter’s response to him below.
Featured Image via MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images
